BOOKS IN BRIEF: FICTION

By David Walton

Published: February 7, 1999

SEIZE THE NIGHT

By Dean Koontz.

Bantam, $26.95.

Dean Koontz's second Christopher Snow novel, set in the scary California beach town of Moonlight Bay, unites two of popular fiction's most fertile traditions, carpe noctem and carpe cerevisiam -- seize the night and seize the beer. Snow, who was introduced to readers in ''Fear Nothing,'' suffers from xeroderma pigmentosum, a rare intolerance to all but the dimmest light. When 5-year-old Jimmy Wing is abducted from his bedroom, Snow and his supersmart Labrador mix, Orson, track the child to Fort Wyvern, an abandoned military base where Snow's mother created a rogue retrovirus that is now spreading genetic changes from species to species. There Snow encounters troops of renegade rhesus monkeys, a flock of kamikaze nighthawks, clusters of weird cocoons and, strangest of all, a greasy white colony of wormlike creatures that can devour the inhabitant of a bioprotection suit. ''Man, I needed a beer,'' says Snow, barely into the night's adventure. He loses Orson, is joined by a surfer named Bobby and an intrepid crew that includes Sasha Goodall, a combat-ready disk jockey; Doogie Sassman, a Harley-Davidson freak; a mind-reading cat named Mungojerrie and Roosevelt Frost, who in any other novel would have been one wintry name too many. ''Your problem is reckless caring,'' Sasha tells Snow, and there you have the secret of Koontz's brand of suspense. For all the talk of ''unknown evils,'' ''Seize the Night'' is really a bros-and-brews backslapper in which characters refer to Coleridge and T. S. Eliot as often as to genetic mutation, and even in the worst of messes (confronting a migration of rattlesnakes or a priest with lobster claws) the hero still finds time to pick up the sax and blow a few bars of ''Quarter to Three.'' David Walton